03:07 am - Musings on Politics and MoralsI've seen a number of recent references to Jonathan Haidt's moral psychology, If you want to go into detail about this, take a look at this interesting 18 minute TED talk, and here's a short article about these ideas and how they are reflected in political views. In brief, the 5 dimensions of Haidt's moral psychology are:

Care for others, protecting them from harm. (He also referred to this dimension as Harm.)

Fairness, Justice, treating others equally.

Loyalty to your group, family, nation. (He also referred to this dimension as Ingroup.)

Respect for tradition and legitimate authority. (He also referred to this dimension as Authority.)

Well higher than the liberal average for Care/Harm (which to me includes actively preventing harm coming to people). To me, this is very obviously the most important aspect of morality, especially when applied to politics or law.

A bit above the liberal average in Fairness.

A bit below liberal average in Loyalty (likely because I value loyalty to people I personally care about very highly but feel essentially no loyalty to abstract entities like nations).

Well below the liberal average for Authority.

Far below liberal average for Purity – there's another test on the site that measures "liberal purity", which measures disgust with things like fast food or genetically modified foods – I also scored exceedingly low on that scale (junk food is occasionally quite yummy :)

On a somewhat related note, I have heard some people (I can't find the sites now) who advocated a 6th axis – liberty, one reason being that it would help differentiate libertarians from liberals, which is a valid distinction. I'm fairly certain where I would fall on that axis – it's considerably less important to me than the first two (Harm & Fairness). I'm now reminded of my post about automatic cars , and how I think that if they become safe and effective enough that laws prohibiting non-emergency manual car use in populated areas are both likely and a good idea. I'm curious how other people feel about that – have a poll.

If automatic cars could be made safe and reliable enough that they reduced both fatal and non-fatal accidents by at least 75%, should turning off automatic control in a car equipped with it (and driving it manually) be illegal in populated areas?

Comments:

I think there needs to be a balance. Society seems to work best on an 80/20 rule (those numbers are negotiable, mind you): 80% being obedient, and the 20% having an independent streak. 20% of any population getting angry enough to 'do summthin aboot it' can often make a huge difference.